The necessary evils of fixing Singapore’s engineering talent shortage

Derrick is the first employee at Kicksend, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in Silicon Valley. This article is a combination of two of his original blog posts.

I’m often asked what is lacking in Singapore’s startup scene. And I always give the same answer — there is no talent pipeline. Startups require a different breed of engineer — the kind that stems from a critical mass of builders, which we don’t yet have.

No doubt, Singapore produces great talent. I’ve met many amazing engineers from Singapore over the past couple of years. And recently, with a steady stream of engineering related events and a growing love of the craft, things are certainly moving forward. But even that isn’t quick enough to sustain the millions of dollars pumped into fueling the long-term aspirations of a flourishing startup ecosystem.

Before we can hope to be a startup hub, we must first be an engineering hub. Singapore must reach a stage where companies like Facebook and Google would decide to open up development centers here instead of just sales offices. You can’t produce a world class tech-centric company without having the right people or by outsourcing your tech team.

PayPal and Yahoo did open engineering offices in Singapore, but they are too small to have significant impact. Amazon Web Services and Palantir have recently been ramping up their engineering staff too. But I foresee them running into hiring issues down the road, as the number of qualified Singaporeans wouldn’t be enough to fill their hiring pipeline.

Hiring and getting advice is another reason why we had to be here [in Silicon Valley]. While there are some really intelligent engineers in Singapore, many of them lack experience in building a large-scale website, compared to those here. — Pete Kim, founder of Nitrous.IO, via TechCrunch

It has been over a year since I’ve written about the state of engineering in a growing ecosystem. Still, there is much work to be done before we can call ourselves an engineering hub.

Everyone wants to be a founder

The ease and ineffectiveness of early stage seed funding is encouraging young engineers to start a company. But there’s a fine balance between starting a company and joining a startup, especially if your talent pool is small. Starting a company isn’t glamorous, and while I’m not discouraging anyone from doing so, it sometimes pays to learn first.

On the flip side, I’ve heard of startups in Singapore making competitive offers to candidates, only to be rejected due to the “risk of a small company”.

Now that’s a fallacy. Engineers are fortunate to be in a position where job security is directly correlated with your attitude and ability, and not with your employer. As long as you stay sharp, you’ll always be hirable.

And yet, I’ve been repeatedly told that graduating Singapore engineers — should they decide to stay in the field — prefer to become project managers, while the ones who do become engineers are foreigners. When the demand for project managers exceed that of engineers, something isn’t quite right.

But it doesn’t help that these talented foreigners are encouraged to join large companies too. With the new regulations in place, getting a P2 Employment Pass requires a minimum salary of S$4,500 ($3,600). Unfortunately, that’s beyond what most local startups can afford. Should they decide to pay less than the minimum, that would count as a Q1 pass, which anecdotally is more heavily scrutinized and has an indeterminate processing time.

Brain drain

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